The New Brunswick Museum has acquired a very large collection of over 400 mounted mammals. Some are very large species. About 60% are head and shoulder mounts, the other 40% are full body taxidermy mounts. Some have some associated diorama materials.
These will be coming to us from an off-site, non-museum out of town location, where I am told they are densely stored in about a 1700 square foot space on private property. I have not seen this collection in person, only from photos. I am they need to be moved to the museum's collections storage imminently, possibly within a few weeks and with as short as possible a processing turnaround time. The space that is being considered for housing them is the museum's current preparation workshop, which is about 1780 square feet. We are no longer able to use this room for preparation work (wood working, painting, etc.) due to ventilation not meeting current health and safety guidelines. The workshop has direct access to a freight elevator and to an exterior single size door. It has a concrete floor and is located on the museum's basement level. The adjacent collections storage rooms house our most pest-vulnerable collections: textiles and ethnographic collections. This workshop room is located directly below the conservation lab and loading bay. We have a small walk in freezer for IPM that is used by all museum departments, but this is not adequate to process this large acquisition, and many of the mounts may not physically fit in any case. The curator in charge of the project would like to avoid hiring freezer trucks, and prefers fumigation. These mounts are from within the last 50 years or so, so I am hoping that arsenic and related hazards may be less of an issue than with older mounts, although I worry about health and safety aspects of fumigating on site, especially as my office is immediately above this space. In addition to my pest related concerns (mainly protecting our other collections), I have been told that some of the mounts have visible mold growth as well as a musty odour, so these are challenging on many fronts I am looking for advice on freezing vs fumigation (onsite or off site) vs inspection and HEPA vacuuming only, and for dealing with this on an extremely tight time frame and with extremely limited resources. I have never dealt with an IPM project of comparable size and scope before, so all advice is appreciated! Dee Dee A. Stubbs-Lee, MA, CAPC Conservator / Restauratrice New Brunswick Museum 277 Douglas Avenue Saint John, New Brunswick E2K 1E5 Canada (506) 643-2341 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MuseumPests" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pestlist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pestlist/5432e973ca8f472eb1e3132bc68c6893%40NBMEX01.NBM.local.
